At Citrix Synergy 2012, the conference dedicated to the convergence of mobile working methods and services in the cloud, Citrix has unveiled its new strategy, products, and services for the mobile enterprise.
With the advent of the era of cloud computing, mobile working patterns are changing and many companies are seeking new ways of working, regardless of location, geographic boundaries and the terminal. Citrix is developing new ways of working by moving through the expansion of its portfolio of cloud solutions that offer everyone the freedom and flexibility, combined with the level of security and supervision, said Wes Wasson, Citrix’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer.
“The key to success in the cloud era is to design everything you do with the assumption that everyone is mobile and is using a mix of personal devices, communications over wireless networks you do not own and using cloud systems,” said Wasson.
Mobile Solutions
Citrix knows that today the workforce is increasingly using mobile devices to make their activities anywhere and with any team. To this end, the company announced certain solutions that contribute to the collaboration.
One such product is GoToAssist, which is defined as a set of cloud tools essential to support mobile work styles. The tool till date has supported 50 million sessions in 15 languages worldwide. Only available in iPhone previous, Citrix has extended its support now to Android devices.
One of the other solutions presented is Citrix collaboration Podium, the first solution after the acquisition of the Danish corporation Podium, which offers a collaborative work platform that supports individuals and teams to do their work in a social context, with different applications based on cloud computing.
Citrix extends its client ShareFile Citrix Receiver software, used by millions of people around the world every day to access business applications on any PC, Mac to tablet and smartphones. The desktop-mobile integration can now provide end users the ability to open, view, edit, save and share documents in their mobile devices, irrespective of where these documents were originally created.
Citrix also announced GoToMeeting HDFaces for the iPad. The new tool features seamless integration of audio conferencing, video conferencing and screen sharing to provide a rich experience for mobile workers.
The company has extended its enterprise mobile applications with CloudGateway 2 offering. The app now adds full support for native HTML 5, iOS and Android apps, in addition to the existing support for XenApp, XenDesktop, web apps and SaaS and provides an extensive mobile platform with application management capabilities.
“One CloudGateway virtual appliance can support tens of thousands of users,” said Sumit Dhawan, group vice president and general manager of Citrix’s Receiver and Gateways group. “They are typically used in pairs to ensure high availability and it is not a compute-intensive function.”
The new CloudGateway also allows IT administrator to manage company owned BYOD devices, remotely wipe applications and data, access controls to apps, and provision of disabling ShareFile accounts.
CloudGateway 2 will be available for enterprise customers starting in July, 2012.
“The trend toward mobile workstyles and BYOD is here today and gaining momentum. With millions of new mobile and employee-owned devices coming into the enterprise, companies are challenged to develop strategies to manage this device chaos. Only an end-to-end solution that separates work content from personal content and brings security and manageability down to the application and data level – a missing piece in today’s point solutions – can enable employee productivity and allow enterprises to support a mobile workforce while maintaining the right levels of security and control,” said Scott Schwarzhoff, Vice President of Product Marketing, Receiver and Gateways at Citrix.
Cloud Solutions
As a part of cloud strategy, Citrix expands the capability to share files over the cloud to enterprise customers. Citrix introduced a new technology called ShareFile StorageZones, which offers enterprise customers the ability to choose optimal locations for storing corporate data, either outside of its facilities in the public cloud, or in facilities located in private data centers.
The new cloud storage solution makes it simple for customers to meet safety requirements, suitability and performance, without sacrificing the elasticity-based data services in the cloud.
Another solution is Podio, a new platform for collaboration in the cloud for businesses. Podio enriches collaboration by bringing the power of mobility and social context. The enhancement is based on Apache Cloudstack and the company’s popular ShareFile file sharing and storage service.
At the Synergy 2012 conference Citrix outspreads RemotePC solution, which allows professionals to remotely access all applications and data to their desktop from any terminal.
Finally, the company announced new desktop virtualization products and HDX devices that help enterprise users to publish apps like a cloud-like service. The products and devices can be managed centrally and can be used on any devices in any location.